{renovate} the never ending-back porch-story

Friends! Hi! Happy Monday! 

While Chris worked on the kitchen this weekend (trim + concrete board!), I worked a little on our back porch, which I haven't talked a lot about -- just a sneak peek here and there. See, my original intention for the back porch was to finish it, have a super dramatic before and after, and then fill you in the details.

Well, nearly three summers after we started the project, we still aren't finished! It takes a back seat to all other projects. And, I realized that my original intentions were silly. Very few spaces in our house are actually done and part of the fun is bringing you guys along for the journey. So I'm going to back up and fill you on where we're at so far. {And please excuse the mess that is the back porch right now -- it's getting cleaner, but it's the staging area for the kitchen!}

For those of you who haven't been reading for the last couple years, the back porch is a screened in addition off the back of our house. Three sides are wall, and one side is screened windows. It's a completely amazing space, but it's needed A LOT of work. The photo above is where the back porch began. Full of crap, dark, dark, dark wood, and unfinished/missing pieces of wall.

My husband, in a move of genius and brilliant forethought, saved the old siding from when he renovated our garage, because it matched the existing siding in the back porch perfectly. So first we set about filling in the missing walls. The green boards are the old garage boards. You can see the texture of the paint in this photo. What you can't see is that the dark boards above were also treated with kind of lacquer that also gave them a lot of texture.We talked through so many options about how to treat the wall. Do we sand it all down? What look are we going for?

In the end we decided to paint the entire thing -- walls + ceiling -- white. This keeps the room, casual, bright and cohesive. And, you can still see the texture, but it doesn't look bad under the coat of white paint. The painting itself was, um ... labor intensive. Because of the grooves between the siding boards, paired with the unevenness and nails in the ceiling, we had to paint the whole room with a BRUSH. Two coats of oil primer + one coat of paint. When I say it took forever, that is an understatement. BUT, white paint was exactly what this space needed and instantly brightened it up. Painting the back porch is by far our most dramatic makeover to date. Seriously. It's even more dramatic than tearing out the wall between our kitchen and living room. {ps, we don't have a dog! We were puppy sitting at the time :)}

You can see in this photo that we also painted the foundation a dark grey to match the rest of the foundation. It also helps really ground the white. We also painted the floor, but I'll talk more about that later.

Here is the other side of the space. Again, missing siding boards, nasty old house door and jail-like and rusty screen door. Actually, if you look at the top left of the house door, you can see a space because the door didn't even fit. Our energy bills LOVED that in the winter ;).

New boards + new doors + paint make a huge difference. You can read about my painting the doors here. And, you can read more about the work that went into this wall here. We had to tear out the whole wall : |.

Clearly the porch was a late addition, because that window goes to a bedroom. Obviously ;). You can see it's broken and very poorly painted.

Aah. Much better. New window glass, new paint and messy paint scraped off and cleaned up.

Walls + ceiling + new lights.

A view of the ceiling. You can see the nails from the roof poking through. It adds ... texture.

So that is our backporch. Friends, we use this space ALL THE TIME. We LOVE it. I'm so glad we've turned it into a space we love and use :).

Why was I out there this weekend? Well a bunch of the caulk between the siding boards cracked and left huge gaping holes. Ugh. So I re-caulked and touched up the paint. It's looking awesome again :). 

From this point on, I'll make sure to keep you filled in on back porch updates. There are still a couple bigger projects up our sleeves back there and I'm excited to bring you guys along for the journey!